Fighting proxy wars in the Third World
By Manohar Malgonkar

THE epic wars of ancient times seem to have been fought over what Herodotus, the world’s very first historian, calls woman-stealing.

As it happens, he was not thinking of the Ramayana, which, of course, is a prime example of his assumption. His Histories is confined to a somewhat narrow corner of the world of which the centre was Greece and its boundaries a circle of about 200 miles.

In Ramayana, Ravana, the king of Sri Lanka, abducts Rama’s beautiful wife, Sita leaving Rama no option but to do his duty as a Kshatriya to invade Sri Lanka to rescue his wife. He raises a vast army, builds a bridge across the strait that separates Sri Lanka from India, defeats Ravana’s army. Thousands of soldiers die and suffer wounds and much havoc is caused to Ravana’s capital and its environs.

And so the beautiful Sita is rescued, but only to be discarded. For Rama says to her: "We cannot live together, any more. How can a Kshatriya take back a wife who has lived so long in a stranger’s house?"

The war over woman-stealing about which Herodotus writes are not much different.

Io, the daughter of a Greek King, was beautiful. One day she heard that a foreign ship had arrived at a nearby port. So she went to take a look at the goods the ship had brought for sale. That was when, "suddenly the Phoenician sailors...made a rush, bundled her aboard the ship, which cleared at once and made off."

The Greeks, for their part, soon went on a princess-raiding expedition of Egypt. Almost as though in exchange for their Io, they brought back the daughter of some Egyptian king, Medea.

It is these raids and counter-raids for stealing beautiful princesses that are said to have worked on the mind of a young man called Paris, the son of Priam, "to steal himself a wife from Greece."

Paris had heard of a ravishingly beautiful princess called Helen. He carried out a raid into her father’s realm and managed to abduct Helen. And thus began the Greek version of Ramayana: the Trojan War. What better cause to fight a war than a beautiful woman. But Rama’s attitude to Sita after her rescue seems to bear out Herodotus commonsense advice: "It seems stupid, after the event, to make a fuss over it. The only sensible thing is to take no notice."

Sensible? But what tribal chief, whether Greek or Phoenician, would remain sensible when some hooligans had kidnapped his daughter? Even if he was aware that there was no real prospect of rescuing the stolen girl unravished —or indeed alive. There was honour to be satisfied, an insult avenged. They were red-blooded men, swayed by emotions.

And stupid? But are not all wars stupid? What was America’s rationale for going into Vietnam — or Britain’s into the Falklands? — or Soviet Russia’s into Afghanistan?

At least, in those prehistoric times, they fought wars for declared aims. Not, as they do today, promote secret wars in distant countries in pursuit of strategic aims.

Such as the Secret Wars which are the subject of Bob Woodward’s book, Veil, which covers the activities of the American CIA, through the 1980s. But let me begin by pointing out what Bob Woodward, intentionally or otherwise, has omitted from his book. I went through its index and found no entry either for Encounter or The East-West Centre.

Encounter was a monthly magazine published in London, and in the sixties and seventies, it had come to be regarded as "required reading" for those of us who professed to be liberal intellectuals. Its scholarship and literary merit was of a very high order. It was edited by Stephen Spender, one of Britain’s most renowned poets, and men and women of formidable talents were among its regular contributors.

And the East-West Centre in Honolulu, was an institution where scholars from the East and the West forgathered, discussed issues, held classes and seminars.

It turned out that both Encounter and the East-West Centre were funded by the CIA, to promote its own strategic pursuits, and that discovery horrified many people who had earlier been full of praise for them.

Personally I don’t see why they should have been so put off. After all if the CIA spends some of its money to support a highbrow magazine which, left to its won resources, had little chance of surviving? Well, why not? Good for the CIA! Then again, who but Uncle Sam has the sort of money to spend on treating scholars from Third World backyards to all-expenses-paid holidays to enable them to mingle with their counterparts from the richer lands. But then subtle persuasion is not the CIA’s style. The ‘Agency’ believes in strong-arm tactics, what the Americans call, ‘kicking ass’. Swing the sledgehammer...and bang!

Their rough and ready methods often create unforeseen fissures and reverse resentments. And there is growing evidence that this is what has happened to the network of agents they created in the wild hills that divide Baluchistan and the Frontier Province of Pakistan.

Here the Pathans and the Baluchis have been nursing tribal feuds for centuries. It was across their divide that the CIA built up its network of killer agents. They had to do this through a sister service, Pakistan’s own ISI. The Americans poured in money, the gadgetry, the weapons, the knowhow; the ISI did the recruiting and training. The combined efforts produced an elite corps of secret agents, the equals of the Hamas or the Hizbullah in the arts of sabotage, arson and assassinations.

For 10 years it worked without a hitch. Then the Cold War stopped. The CIA pulled out its forces from Pakistan. The flow of dollars suddenly ceased. And here were these hundreds of men, highly trained, with neither control nor targets for their skills.

The old feuds reasserted themselves. Baluchis and Pathans found their own patrons. There were others who were only too ready to take them on, and give them tasks that were tailor-made for their skills.

In January 1993, one of these men, Mir Aimal Kansi, loitered near the gate of the CIA’s headquarters in Virginia. It was time for the offices to open. Presently a blue Volkswagon drove up and paused for a red light. Kansi pulled out his AK-47 and blew off the head of its driver, Frank Darling, who even though a CIA agent, had worked in Karachi in a civilian capacity. Then Kansi fired more point-blank shots at the waiting cars, killing four CIA agents and wounding another. Then he walked away to his parked car and drove off. That same night, he took a PIA flight to Karachi.

Two years later, another killer squad killed three CIA workers in Karachi, who, too were working under cover, but of course they were known to their killers.

A CIA veteran, Victor Machet, now retired, said in an interview: "We did some pretty dirty things together in Afghanistan." Well, it looks as though others too have learned to play the same games. Osama bin Laden does not have to look far for trained super-commandos.